ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector | Hacker News Reader

ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector

buchodi.com

764 pointslmbbuchodi395 comments

I am once again happy that the EU is fighting practices like these via legislation.

Some outcomes can be annoying, but the net result is still positive, for the consumers and their data privacy at least.

The adtech/data broker business is still very lively in EU. The last time I read into it a year or two ago the consensus seemed to be the privacy gains over the last decade have been modest at best. There was a few big name trackers that were forced to narrow data collection but the general ad/location tracking and data broker business is still mostly the same.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.06862

https://netzpolitik.org/2025/databroker-files-targeting-the-...

Do the big guys sell to the small guys? Like if I'm a shady small company trying to buy as much information as I can about a certain user, will I freely get the data from X and Facebook and Google?

There are multiple reasons for it. One of the major issues is that some DPAs pretty refuse to enforce GDPR (e.g. DPC in Ireland). Hopefully the changes to cross-border enforcement that are coming in force next year will help with this as it at least has some deadlines unlike currently.

Another issue is that controllers generally do not need to change their behavior before the final lawful decision which can take a lot of time to go through the court system, especially if it needs CJEU referral. And once the decision comes in force they can often make small changes and restart the whole process.

Also another issue is that DPAs do not often initiate the investigations themselves (unless breach is involved), they only happen at the request of data subjects and not that many people bother making complaints or follow them up. Just yesterday I had to follow up with 9 page reply to the controller's response to the DPA inquiry.

Additionally ePD and GDPR enforcement is sometimes split between different agencies. In those cases GDPR agency tends to wait for ePD case to be solved before investigating the GDPR aspects, often because the ePD consent validity will affects e.g. GDPR legal basis analysis.

Perhaps, perhaps not. Big trackers reducing data collection is a win in my book. OpenAI is not doing ad personalization for the EU customers. There are no Flock cameras.

It’s an ongoing fight for sure but it’s some fight at least.

> Some outcomes can be annoying

I'd classify mandatory encryption backdoors as an industry crisis rather than an annoyance.

Which has nothing to do with the stalking of the adtech industry, unless you are suggesting that the EU might sell access to the keys to the likes of OpenAI?

[though you are not wrong that encryption backdoors are a backwards step on individuals rights to privacy]

Encryption backdoors by definition mean everybody who wants it gets hands on your data. You can't make backdoors only the "good guys" can access.

And while, sure, adtech corpos maybe won't due to the bad PR, what about the Kremlin, criminal organizations, or your insane abusive ex?

It kind of does. It's like "I want an all powerful regulatory agency that can impose rules by dictat, but I only want them to do this things I agree with"

When has the EU mandated encryption backdoors?

They keep trying it via e.g. chat control

> I am once again happy that the EU is fighting practices like these via legislation.

As long as you manage to navigate all the dark patterns and not accidentally give your "informed consent".

Malicious compliance (or as it more usually is malicious noncompliance that has not been sufficiently punished so the slimy buggers feel free to continue) is something you should blame the stalkers of adtech for, more than the EU. The legislators could perhaps have made the definitions less wavy, and been harder with enforcement, but that doesn't make it all their fault.

These problems were quite widely foreseen during the legislative process, and partly had already been exhibited by the earlier ePrivacy directive. I don't know whether it matters who's to blame, but my trust in EU being very effective in these fights in the future either is not very high.

Is it now? Are Alphabet, Microsoft, Yahoo and Meta's platforms and call-home products illegal for exposure to EU residents? i.e. Google, Bing, Facebook, WhatsApp, MS Office and such? Are these companies' C-suite people wanted, to be charged massive breaches of user privacy?

Seeing some legitimate executive accountability would be lovely in this day and age, but even fines going into the billions of euros are still just the cost of doing business in a ridiculously lucrative space. That they also happen to dominate by oligopoly.

And the sane world is fighting the EU BS with geo blocking.

Just set up your user agent to work as you wish, isn't that simpler than have unelected, technologic dumb bureaucrats writing laws that are complex and don't solve the issue?

How is that going to prevent OpenAI snooping on you via adtech? Inquiring minds want to know.

By blocking every request to their servers?

Are you equally happy that the EU is attempting to mandate backdoors into technological platforms and outlaw private encrypted communication?

Copypasting my reply to someone who made almost exactly the same point in a sibling comment earlier:

Which has nothing to do with the stalking of the adtech industry, unless you are suggesting that the EU might sell access to the keys to the likes of OpenAI [though you are not wrong that encryption backdoors are a backwards step on individuals rights to privacy]

Things could be worse. It could be like most of the US where there are both no (or at least far fewer) protections against invasive behaviour of private companies and the government actively trying to backdoor private comms.

> Which has nothing to do with the stalking of the adtech industry

It has a lot to do with the practices of the adtech industry. If privacy is protected and upheld vis-a-vis the government (or meta-government in case of the EU), it may be upheld vis-a-vis private corporations and other governments. But if the government likes to be able to spy on its citizens, it will not foster mechanisms, practices and a culture of private communications.

But - I agree that it could be much worse.

Sorry, you said "Some outcomes can be annoying, but the net result is still positive, for the consumers and their data privacy at least," which warrants both of the replies you received given the massive, unacceptable breach in privacy which Chat Control and similar laws exercise. This is not a "backwards step", this is throwing out the entire concept of privacy and replacing it with a shapeshifting doppelganger that can morph depending on the target.

> Things could be worse. It could be like most of the US

Yep, it could definitely be worse, but your response ignored the obvious intention behind my question. Saying, "but the US is bad, too" doesn't make your prior take of EU law being a net good for privacy any less uninformed.

Unfortunately, most LLM companies always were naturally an intelligence operation on civilians, and determining if they are now state-backed seems like a irrelevant detail.

Privacy has been dead for some time now. The fact is most business people never figure out how they are exploited. The modern intelligence campaigns just made it economical to hit almost everyone regardless of scale... often under some silly pretense like terrorists wanting our underpants. =3

I don't know if the destruction of many industries in the EU--including manufacturing--can be called an annoyance.

All the EU bureaucrats can do is regulate, that's why it's so difficult to do business in the EU and that's why there is so little innovation over here. If Microsoft and Apple were started in the EU they would've been shut down within a week because you can't operate from a garage.

I guess that every once in a while this might have a positive outcome for consumers, a broken clock is right twice a day.

I'm sure Microsoft and Apple could have been able to afford a cheap office given their parents' generous financing.

And, regarding the original topic, we wouldn't have many of these privacy issues if the US had not strategically failed to regulate its obnoxious tech monopolies

What do you think US bureaucrats do other than regulate? The federal government drives people crazy. Have you ever tried to file taxes in the USA? It’s so complex you end up having to pay for the privilege.

The innovation gap is real but it’s not just to do with regulation. It’s a lot to do with concentrated capital networks (eg Silicon Valley). And sure, the tech giants are in the USA but it’s not like there’s no innovation in the EU. Spotify in Sweden. Challenger banks in the U.K. (included as Monzo predates Brexit). And plenty of innovation - they just get bought by US companies. Which is a financial market weakness, not a regulatory one.

I don't see how that's relevant? Regulation might have limited some innovation in tech, but gdpr does not affect any of the dying industries. That's more from competition with china, companies with too much interest in giving payouts to shareholders than to innovate, and US financial industry buying most of the best players

GDPR is being changed to allow tracking and AI training without consent, EU only protects people if it’s the interest of EU companies, GDPR is now too costly so it has to be dismantled in certain areas.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/4087347/european-commi...

To me, this quote just about sums it up:

> The mechanism is standard adtech. What has no precedent is running it on an AI chat product.

As someone who has been well aware of this mechanism for quite some time, I still feel icky anytime I re-read the details of it.

What a time to be alive.

People think they're interacting with an "intelligence," when actually they're just getting a maximally optimized Weizenbaum feed. We're living through the sloppification of the human mind.

See e.g., https://www.science.org/content/article/ai-chatbots-are-beco...

Could you define (or link) to what "Weizenbaum feed" means/references? Too obscure for me but I'm interested. Thanks.

Likely a reference to ELIZA: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ELIZA

Are there really people that can't tell the difference between ELIZA and something that can solve open Millennium Prize Problems in math?

humorously, my regular iPhone on a residential home network failed the cloudflare AI bot detection and i can’t read that article

People don't believe me that Cloudflare blocks more humans than bots. They see in the dashboard "number of bots blocked" and it's like their brain turns off.

Surely there are more bots than humans.

If you don't also display how many humans were blocked, how they know?

You're in for a big disappointment when you interact with People™

Or both, you know. An intelligence that also spies on you

Why is it so black and white?

What's the old quote from WW2?

  I couldn't help but notice how each successive headline reporting our glorious victories seemed to draw closer to Tokyo.

Something like that.

Well. I can't help but notice how each successive headline reporting how this "scam"/stochastic parrot/"scare quotes intelligence" seems to be solving more and more things that were but a few years ago widely regarded as being indicators of high intelligence.

Being highly convinving is one of the things on that list.

It was Berlin and not Tokyo, I believe. Germany kept producing newsreels until the very end. Many of them are now on Youtube, a very interesting watch on how to frame things positively.

I've heard many variants; Paris in an earlier war, too.

I try to keep an open mind about propaganda fooling me today; the people who were fooled in the past often were not fools themselves.

We need a downfall parody: "Hitler uses Openclaw".

Nobody is denying that it's effective. They're denying intelligence

A programming contest has a problem where given N < 10000, do something hard like come up with the number of primes less than N

You can come up with all sorts of algorithms that do intelligent things. But the most effective solution is to use metaprogramming to make a massive switch statement that contains all the answers

Are they denying intelligence, or are they redefining it in such a way that only humans can be intelligent? Can you come up with a definition of intelligence that would apply to crows and ant colonies, which are obviously intelligent to some degree, but not the current generation of AI systems?

On your particular point about finding the most “effective” solution, this is something that I expect agents to be very good at.

When AI does it we call it “reward hacking” but when humans do it we call them clever.

This is classic AI goalposts-moving.

OK, they can play chess, but that's not real AI - can they write poems? OK, they can write poems, but that's not real AI - can they compose music? OK, they can compose music, but that's not real AI - can they translate languages? OK, they can translate text, but can they do maths? OK, they can do maths, but can they solve a Millenium Prize? <-- we are here

Wow, that quote goes hard.

I’m reminded that almost no one beyond a select few knew high up in the military and around the emperor knew how badly the Japanese were defeated at Midway.

Paternalistic. Arrogant. Shameful. And deeply engrained in the Japanese cultural zeitgeist (of the early-mid 20th century).

Edit: I guess it’s commonly attributed to a German citizen, but their cultures mirrored each other. Fascism falling under the weight of its own propaganda.

Whenever I say something like “that’s a cool feature, but to do it you would have to build spyware”, everyone else is just like “the cat is out of the bag ¯\_(ツ)_/¯”. (I don’t build spyware, or work on projects that do).

It blows my mind that people don’t care about the world they are building with this stuff. It’s a real tragedy of the commons. People see these collaborators from different wars and regimes and think “I’d stand up against the bad guy”… well I’ve got news for you if you build spyware, you are not the person you think you are.

This is the best retort to the bag-escaping cat ever:

https://gowers.wordpress.com/2026/09/17/why-i-didnt-sign-the...

"Nothing is worse to the demise of a society, than people who want to convince you that the cat is out of the bag and will not go back in, while the cat is being violently shook out of the bag at the same time."

A great quote, thank you for sharing. It captures much of the five stages of denial (summarized below) in a much pithier form.

There's nothing in the bag.

The cat will never get out of the bag.

It wouldn't be a problem if the cat was out of the bag.

We cannot possibly keep the cat in the bag.

Putting the cat back in the bag is not worth trying.

Motion to start a political platform for cats in bags. Our message is simple: Put the cat in the bag. Keep the cat in the bag.

Don't force it out of the bag if it doesn't want to leave.

No, the greatest is from the Sweet Smell of Success: "The cat's in the bag. And the bag's in the river."

And the river's in the canyon and the canyon's in the plateau and the plateau's in the volcanic shield and the green grass grows all around, all around, and the green grass grows all around.

> It’s a real tragedy of the commons

Seems more like a real tragedy of private enterprise.

We used to assume that the surveillance world would be built by government (1984). But it turned out to be equally likely to be built by the free market.

Turns out the entities you control / regulate less, tend to do things that are less in your interest and more in their own.

The government has few uses for total surveillance, and almost all are obviously bad. Private enterprise has a million uses, most of them various degree of bad, but as a society we've been blind to this kind of badness for many decades now - for at least as long as lying in the face of your fellow humans and trying to hurt them materially has been considered a respectable profession.

It's because capitalism won the (absurd black-and-white framing of the) cold war, with America as its the biggest winner. We don't even recognize the level of propaganda that has gone into convincing us all that "markets" are the best optimizer ever designed and that profit equals morality--we just accept these as base principles without questioning them. Surveillance produces profit? Well let's have more then.

Well, currently the free market is the government, while the nominal government is something less powerful than that.

> It blows my mind that people don’t care about the world they are building with this stuff. It’s a real tragedy of the commons.

When I ask people about things like this, I hear a lot of "If I don't build it, someone else will"

My goal isn't just to refuse to build this stuff, it is actively to resist the people who are.

I don't have much influence though

It's such a bizarre attitude. Like I think this stuff deserves decade+ long prison sentences for everyone involved, and they just don't care. Like imagine if mugging were legal and the people doing it just said "hey, if I don't rob you, someone else will."

Well, some people care and some don't. The people who care don't get to work on the technology.

I'm pretty unhappy with this, but are ChatGPT or Facebook really "the commons"?

They're each in different grey areas that were previously the commons.

Facebook didn't invent "talking to friends" or "showing adverts", but made itself "the place" hard enough most of the advertisers and most of the people intermediate through it.

OpenAI didn't invent "asking questions and recieving answers", not even "from an agent who knows which sites to search on your behalf"; but it is competent enough that I might have it read 50 times as many pages in a day as I myself would have read, and the sites' owners don't get real eyeballs looking at ads during this. (In my case, adblock even if I did it manually; but apply this massive increase in page hits to everyone who has their LLM research stuff).

I think the internet in general is a commons and I should be able to browse it without being spied on.

There should be general standards for what individual apps and websites should be allowed to do. There should be an expectation that the purpose of an app is what it does, i.e. a social connection app shouldn’t be an ad platform that suffers users insofar as they provide useful data to sell to advertisers.

I think any free platform with a billion people on it is, de facto, a commons. It would be great if we as a society acknowledged this and had come up with some better means of stewardship because the status quo is obviously heinous, but we've been happy to hand over absolute control of public discourse to a few trillion dollar tech companies.

Common people work there and built the tools. At any point, they could have chosen not to. Or told the boss guy it wasn't plausible. At the end of the day, we're choosing and building the world we're in, while also loudly complaining about what we choose to do.

Blaming a corporation takes away all the agency the workforce has.

Your issue is you are defining spyware too broadly. This is not spying on users, but rather 2 companies partnering and sharing data to result in either a better ads system or better understanding on how ads are performing. This is a positive value to society and the commons. Wasting space in a site or app with an ad that won't convert is the true tragedy of the commons. It's a waste of time and money for all parties involved.

Can't you see? We're just trying to build a better cigarette! Flavored to your specific tastes! You'll thank us, you'll see!

No ad has ever converted me yet the ad networks keep showing me ads.

Is this due to them being irrelevant or you being stubborn against ads. It's possible you would enjoy these goods and services if you tried them out.

Yeah, this is just standard third-party cookie functionality, which has always been sketchy. It honestly seems like it was only possible by accident; browsers have long prevented sites from reading cookies from other domains, but it seems like the people working on early specs might not have considered the ramifications of being able to set cookies for domains other than your own. A couple decades ago it might have seemed like no one would have any reason to set a cookie they couldn't read.

Maybe 3 decades ago people had excuses, but the latest decade of cookie abuses have been designed by people who not only knew better but who took that better world into account as they buried it away from the general public. The fact that half a million developers think CORS is a server security measure isn't an accident.

A lot of the Meta/Google folks jumped ship to Openai/Anthropic. This kind of work is expected

> What has no precedent is running it on an AI chat product.

Meta?

"standard adtech"

I hate stuff like this. Sometimes euphemisms are kind, like "senior citizen" instead of "old person".

But this is an attempt to normalize bad behavior that is really quite terrible for society.

MDN lists how different browsers prevent this: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Privacy/Guides/...

Firefox, Brave and Safari do. Chrome and Edge do not.

That’s not fully protect you. They still can match short living third party identifiers with their domain cookie or device_id from app. It is not 1-1 matching but works relatively good with modern itp.

This would work for an ad shown on ChatGPT and then clicked on (or in the ChatGPT app).

But it would not give ChatGPT information about which other sites are visited.

Of course there would be non-cookie options like fingerprinting (also via IP) that would allow tracking non-the-less.

So you might be talking with OpenAI about your marriage problems and then based on the IP the OpenAI ad network would start showing ads for divorce lawyers on unrelated sites you browse to that display ads.

The solution to that would be using a VPN.

Yes, you click is the easiest option. Yes, cookie + fingerprinting (which also contains ip information) is the option. But we VPN still not fully protect you. But things like private relay and vpn definitely add another level of complexity.

Not an accurate summary. That link actually says:

> Google Chrome doesn't block third-party cookies by default, only in Incognito mode, or when users explicitly set it to block third-party cookies via chrome://settings.

Looks like the settings let you block all third-party cookies and add exceptions for specific sites, which seems a bit awkward but could be made to work.

Alternatively, you could run OpenAI in its own profile, or look into what extensions might do.

>Looks like the settings let you block all third-party cookies and add exceptions for specific sites, which seems a bit awkward but could be made to work.

The fear over blocking third party cookies breaking stuff is severely overstated. I have it disabled by default and I don't think I've ever seen any website breakages. The most is office365 nagging me to click on links so it can authenticate across domains.

> Google Chrome doesn't block third-party cookies by default, only in Incognito mode

And the focus on cookies only is also intentionally misleading. Tracking is not just cookies. Chrome will track you in Incognito mode.

I think that if they don’t block by default, is quite significant. Chrome + Edge has superior marketshare and then add the % people who have no idea what these mean and don’t change defaults.

Not sure what point you're trying to make. Do you think politely asking an ad company to disable ads on their browser is a reasonable thing to spend your effort doing?

I was going to say, wasn't this supposed to be the default in Chrome by now? But Google reneged on it two years back:

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/google-third-party-cookies-chro...

This disgusts me more than any of their recent news. There needs to be a lot more pressure on them to phase this out.

Maybe this article will be the small snowball that gets that started...

I know people use chat bots differently and I get that companies see value in personalization, but to me it is extremely valuable that I can start a chat without context.

When researching a topic a chatbot can be quite sensitive to certain wording and those can end up steering definitions. Two context free chats on the same topic can go in very different ways depending on how you word things, but when using the notebook feature in Gemini, where every chat becomes part of the context you completely lose the ability to discover if a topic is vaguely defined or have many definitions.

I never want my new chats contaminated with information from previous sessions for this exact reason.

2 context free chats can go in very different ways even with the same words sometimes!

I personally like the option to have context free chat or chats with memories. What I dont want is a chat based on memories that I didn't explicitly consent to (ie browsing history etc)

My usage of incognito chats using prompts from other sessions has gone way up. I'm tired of it doing the "you're absolutely right" bit for every new piece of information I bring and it completely trying to donate U-turn.

I feel like having any existing context absolutely poisons the ability to go in a different direction. I’m not sure if there’s a good way to fix this.

https://www.pangram.com/history/c3ad864f-2a50-4785-a0ef-71f2...

why not use your own words? If you are gonna ai generate this blog, just post the prompts instead.

There's a certain irony in linking to someone else and then saying "use your own words". If we follow that, we get a pretty obvious answer: sometimes someone else can express it better and faster.

Most people do not, in fact, want to read raw prompts.

It’s misleading to post model output on a blog, especially when the about says

> This blog is where I write about what I find.

Why not simply include a disclaimer that it was AI model output not his own writing? Because humans don’t like AI writing and the article wouldn’t be featured on as many tech news sites. Hence the sin of omission, the choice to mislead.

Are you referring to the Pangram link? I’d consider that akin to a reference supporting the comment’s point, not a substitute for the comment’s point.

> Most people do not, in fact, want to read raw prompts.

I wonder if this is really true, and if it will remain true for long. Have you observed someone read another person’s raw prompt? Or observed someone submit both their prompts and their LLM output for review?

Personally I’d be curious about the prompts for a lot of top HN articles which are LLM-generated. It would say a lot more about the human operator’s intent and thinking process compared to the LLM output.

A coworker who spoke English as a second language once screen shared their Claude session during a code review, and it was interesting that their prompts were all in their native language. The guy wasn’t writing an article, and I didn’t understand the prompt anyway, but I still found it interesting as a glimpse into how he uses LLMs.

For this particular article, if the prompt was initially a series of bullet points that wouldn’t be so bad. If there were multiple prompts spent editing and rearranging the article that would be an unusual work by pre-LLM standards. However I’d suggest that instead of dismissing the idea, we could embrace “raw prompts” as a kind of new medium, to cross the divide between pro-LLM and anti-LLM readers.

> Most people do not, in fact, want to read raw prompts.

I also wonder what is the energy consumptiom difference between the prompt and fetching website.

If you can't be bothered writing it, why should I be bothered reading it?

I'd rather read raw prompts. Most people can consume the slop if they wish.

Having an LLM generate major parts of text that you (whether explicitly or lying by omission) claim as yours is dishonest and plagiarism, and it baffles me that many people just don't seem to mind or see anything problematic about it.

How is this adding to the discussion? The post in itself is quite informative.

Do you constantly want to be reading ai-generated content on this site? If so, why not just stay on chatgpt.com and ask it to generate what hackernews.com would look like today? It's adding to the discussion because I feel like the author broke a social contract by probably putting less effort into writing this than I did reading it.

Having an LLM generate major parts of text that you (implicitly or explicitly) claim as yours is dishonest and plagiarism and should be brought to readers' attention, and it baffles me that many people just don't seem to mind or see anything problematic about it.

> just post the prompts instead.

Why would anyone want that?

Because I want to read the author's words, not claude's, chatgpt's or grok's.

Note to folks who have this same thought (seems like many given other comments). Why are you on this site if you aren't here for human-created content? If you want AI generated blogs/posts there are plenty of sites like linkedin, twitter, chatgpt, and claude that will give you meaningless content with a press of a button.

Why would you want n people to compute an AI prompt independently instead of reading the output once? And why would that be better?

At least criticise the article on merit and not some 'let me google that for you' high horse. If it's slop it's slop, but let the votes speak for that.

> OpenAI's ad collector at bzr.openai.com sets a cookie called __obi, scoped to .openai.com

This sentence is way too much detail and it's literally the first thing you read. I can pick apart most of the sentences in the article. Another one:

> Across 932 decoded sync tokens, 736 carried subject_type: account_user and 196 carried anonymous

This sentence is pointless. What matters to proving that "It works when you are logged out" is to show that the identifier is stable. Why does the reader care about the actual counts.

AI has a tendency to do this which makes AI generated text a lot harder to read. The raw prompts likely don't have the specific websites and cookie names because that's not relevant to the reader or writer for that matter - it's a footnote at best.

I understand this, I just think that 'share the prompt' will never get a result. Either the prompt is total dogshit or you learn that it was written in a certain way to create a narrative. That's information the author will never reveal.

Like I say, slop is slop. It's easy to detect. This post and the OP's actual website is basically just a few AI blog posts. I would just treat it as spam and disengage.

Not everyone would actually send the prompt to an LLM. Some would have the opportunity to see the prompt as its own artifact, devoid of LLM-generated “hallucinations”.

> let the votes speak for that.

The comment you are replying to got a fair number of votes too… Having somebody run a Pangram check saves n people the trouble of doing the same.

Why comment if you have nothing good to say?

Hello Pot, I would like to introduce you to Kettle.

Another one.

The technology isn't anything new but, it's the context that makes it so uncomfortable.

People have very different "expectations" of privacy when they're having a conversation with an AI VS when they're browsing something like Facebook

Not to mention Facebook is free whereas you pay for a GPT subscription

I'm old enough to remember when people had expectations of privacy on Facebook, when the discovery that they didn't made for schocked headlines.

You know, Facebook, built by the guy who scraped college databases for personal information without the student's permission.

There was never any expectation of privacy if you knew Zuck's history. Facemash almost got him expelled for violating individual privacy.

That's the trick: in the early years, most people didn't know Zuckerberg's history.

Caveat emptor, the saying goes. If people don't have an appetite for privacy, don't expect them to take a principled stance based on outrageous headlines.

It's not a coincidence that federally backdoored spyware like Windows is the most popular operating system in the world. I too remember the shocked headlines of the Snowden revelations, and ten-plus years later I work shoulder to shoulder with people that couldn't possibly care less. There is no expectation of privacy, HN too quickly extrapolates it's own virtue signalling to normal people that enjoy using spyware like TikTok, Facebook and Windows.

Back then I didn't have expectations of privacy, I think. I just didn't have a notion of privacy. I didn't think the internet was hostile, I believe?

ChatGPT is also freely available

> Not to mention Facebook is free whereas you pay for a GPT subscription

Recalling the now-old adage: Facebook is only free if your time and privacy are worthless.

>Not to mention Facebook is free whereas you pay for a GPT subscription

The overwhelming majority of users do not pay and use the free service.

I don’t think there is any consistency in behavior. People react viscerally to the unproven belief that the Facebook app records conversations. They’ll also happily buy big TVs despite the fact they’re very much listening to you and we have solid evidence that it’s for ads or residential proxying. Most people have no idea how ads “follow” you, or how companies can figure out what you talked about by connecting the dots from other user metadata.

The surveillance economy hits again. The only business model they can think of. Combined with state capture this gives unprecedented power over the Average Joe, who will hand his life, his soul and his vote to Big Brother without a thought.

So basically the same kind of tracking that Facebook, Google, etc have been doing for decades?

Which has really only been accepted because 99% of people don’t understand how it works. Hard to be outraged by something you can’t see or understand. In my book, the practice is akin to malware. I recently opened a website for an AI service in incognito mode, because I didn’t care to have it in my search results. Despite avoiding third party cookies here, the site still fired off a tracker to Meta, who then correlated my home IP address with my Facebook account, and filled my feed with ads for this AI service. When I was tracked like this despite a somewhat informed defense, which defense do normal people have against this? None.

Similar, yes, but some people are paying OpenAI to be part of this business model, unlike typical free-riding Google and Facebook users.

If you pay OpenAI full price, this machinery should never be used. The only paying customers getting ads are the “ad supported” tier.

I think you can easily imagine a future where the subscription model token subsidy ramps down and is replaced by ads, but it’s important to use precise language about the current state of the world.

Yes, “Go” plan users pay and also receive ads. They pay less.

Derogatory "Free-riding users". "Free riding users" should have the same privacy as the paying ones.

Kind of silly. You have to pay somehow. Either pony up cash or pay with your eyeballs or data. But I doubt paying will give you privacy either.

Will the government pay OpenAI to run an ad-free free tier?

Yes. But there is no surprise given that OpenAI hired lots of ex-Meta and Google employees for that reason.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whataboutism

The fact that others do the same doesn’t make any of the cases excusable.

Yes, the thing that many people do not like is now being done by yet another company.

Part of the reason I stopped using facebook is, beyond the content being terrible, it was super creepy that they would show me ads for things I searched for on other sites. I even have facebook in its own container, but it must have some additional tracking available because it would still know that I was searching for exact clothing brands, college apparel, trips, etc. I already saw gemini integrate some information about me into an answer recently and am getting the feeling I won't be using it much longer. I'm not surprised openAI is going to try to make money similarly. Gross.

I've never worked in adtech (and hopefully never will), but the first idea that would pop into my head for trying to track people who sequestered their cookies like this would be to have the sites who put in the third-party cookies include the IP address. If only one Facebook account is known to log into that IP, you know who it belongs to, even when there's no active login.

I imagine that people actively trying to make money off stuff like this would have come up with plenty more ideas than just this one.

I made a browser extension that opens every tab to a proxy with a new ip address. I have a /25 at home that will keep my browsing more or less anonymous these days. I have another 200 ip addresses available through my colo, but a non residential address limits a lot of sites

I was talking about changing banks with my spouse, the following two weeks I get podcast ads and Samsung TV ads about the bank I mentioned. I use all the usual off the shelf "dont track me" stuff like a pihole and a "resit fingerprinting" Firefox fork and a VPN and everything else. I'm not amazed it still somehow got me, just sad.

This is a very common practice called retargeting / behavioral targeting and has existed for about 2 decades at this point. Facebook is hardly the only company that does this.

Modern browsers are more strict towards third party cookies, but there are plenty of ways to work around this.

Why must every piece or technology, every software service or cloud "thing"™ devolve into Advertising?! That's it, I'm out. No more ChatGPT for me.

What I'm more interested is in that the entire model is based on us being reduced to walking talking living breathing coin wallets. It's like a planet scale game where the companies are the players and we carry the loot.

We use a great chunk of our lifespan to procure the coins and every company is designed to extract as many coins from us as possible.

What happens to this game/real world when this model collapses? We can't procure, they can't extract. What then?

I agree, precisely. I'm kind of sick and tired of it to be honest. What if we collectively (humanity that is), just quit? What if we all stop playing? (I think you're saying this) -- But seriously. Both OpenAI and every other place (gawd I hope others aren't doing this) need to figure out their business model fast™ and make it a viable business without devolving into this tracking, marketing and advertising bullshit some of us have only seen far too often -- that have driven us away from things like Meta/Fac** and others...

This is incredibly sad, with google you can atleast use the argument that search was free (which is still weak IMO). But with OAI collecting indiscriminate data on paying customers is just incredibly sad.

The ads are the product that people are paying for. “Consumer” AI is currently marketed as agents that book restaurants for you, buy cat food before you run out, organize your travel, etc. etc. These are targeted ads for a particular restaurant, pet store, airline, etc. Some people find this desirable.

You can pay for whatever Google service and they still collect this data. Same with meta subscription.

With paid services, Google generally does not collect. Or at least you can opt out of collection, email scanning, etc.

Why does ChatGPT need to know that? That should be illegal.

Something like it is basically a requirement if you want to see digital ads. Advertisers want to know how many people who saw/clicked their ad went on to make a purchase.

Safari and Firefox should isolate the cookie by default.

> Something like it is basically a requirement if you want to see digital ads.

It is not a requirement and no one wants to see ads.

Plenty of people want ads. Every time someone asks “hey ChatGPT what do I need to buy to fix my sink” or “hey Claude what’s the best cat food” or “what’s the best island in the Caribbean for me to visit” they are specifically asking to see an ad.

Oops sorry that should have read "sell"

>Safari and Firefox should isolate the cookie by default.

That's what firefox's total cookie protection (enabled by default) does.

>> Why does ChatGPT need to know that? That should be illegal.

> Something like it is basically a requirement if you want to see digital ads.

So to summarize, yes, it should be illegal.

> Safari and Firefox should isolate the cookie by default

Doesn't mean you won't be tracked by about 15 other means.

To make the only consumer revenue that will really ever be available.

Remember they once predicted it would be 50% of their income.

This is the only way they get there.

Attribution is a core part of building an ads system.

Because it's another surveillance adtech company from SillyCon Valley. Duh.

It turns out that the only way to make money online is ads.

Nobody is going to pay for ChatGPT. They'll just use the ad-infested version, like they do everything else online. Well some people will pay, but not enough to justify the insane amounts of money being poured into it by investors.

Governments will also pay for the tracking capabilities, as they're already doing to Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.

Yes, I should have said "ads and tracking" good point.

A bigger problem is that it will be impossible to know when you are seeing an ad: political groups (or the government, perhaps) will partner with openAI to subtly express different values.

It's still an advertisement, and the underlying marketplace is similar (pay for access to change behavior).

The best uses of AI will be surveillance, propaganda, cyberterrorism, and automated military tech.

See, e.g., https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/18/technology/iran-china-aut...

> The best uses of AI will be surveillance, propaganda, cyberterrorism, and automated military tech.

I think it is more insidious than that. AI shapes how people think not just what they think.

This is why you use Firefox that keeps the cookie jars separate (by default, AFAIK). That should prevent this specific implementation, shouldn't it?

Yes, it should. But this is also why you use uBlock Origin to block tracker scripts.

Firefox is my daily on desktop, but on mobile it's Safari. I finally got around to installing uBlock Origin Lite on iOS. I used to run the Firefox version on iOS, but that was discontinued long ago, and I never replaced it. I feel like a bit of an idiot for not doing this sooner.

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ublock-origin-lite/id674534269...

> I feel like a bit of an idiot for not doing this sooner.

Don’t beat yourself up, uBlock Origin on iOS is only four months old.

There are other ways to track. Containers offer a bit mote protection, but the IP address is still visible (unless VPN).

Containers don’t offer a benefit over normal browsing for this, Firefox already blocks and isolates third party cookies.

Caching is also a tracking signal.

Caches are also isolated. One of the reasons you shouldn't use a JavaScript CDN any more.

And the number of websites with ChatGPT ad trackers is on track to be doubled from last month.

according to Bloomberry: https://bloomberry.com/data/chatgpt-ads/

My DNS server (which uses Hagezi's excellent blacklists) returns NXDOMAIN for bzr.openai.com. Serves OpenAI right.

I keep meaning to set this up but haven't. What's the simplest best setup for my own DNS blocker?

For simplicity I highly recommend https://nextdns.io. Supports most devices, and probably most, if not all, well known blacklists.

Also recommend NextDNS

Forget if they have Hagezi though. Also it would be really nice if there was a way to export and import custom URL lists and rules....

The easiest off-the-shelf option would be a router running OpenWrt. IIRC, it natively uses dnsmasq, and the relevant blacklists can be obtained from here:

https://github.com/hagezi/dns-blocklists

My own setup is DIY: a Debian box running Unbound (recursive DNS) with the RPZ blacklists from above. This gets rid of the upstream DNS service such as the ISP's completely, and prevents tampering or censorship.

For a home network network pihole or unbound also supports blocklists (bundled with opnsense for example if you also want a firewall). For Android, I use Rethink with Hagezi blocklists, so they block also when I am on mobile data (it is vpn based).

Hmmm Pihole I guess. Runs on a pi zero (1 or 2 but 2 is better ofc)

Yuuup. tracking consumers and finding spending correlations to exploit was the entire reason for the "Data Science" and "ML" pushes that got us here.

For browsers that implement strict cookie partitioning, the privacy concern is moot. With this, the cookie jar that's used when chatgpt.com is a 3rd party site is completely separate for the jar used on the 1st party site. So your chatgpt.com account can't be linked to your ad views.

Since this has been standard ad tech for awhile, browsers have reacted to this to implement cookie partitioning for exactly these privacy reasons.

Modern adtech fingerprints your browser regardless of cookies, so they can still know who you are. The fingerprint consists of a combination of facts about your browser that together uniquely identify it (screen resolution, timezone, installed fonts and browser extensions, OS version, User agent, even GPU with some forms of canvas fingerprinting, etc.) ChatGPT uses fingerprinting too. Cookie isolation isn't relevant, only anti fingerprinting techniques are.

No it doesn't, if you:

1. Never register with OpenAI/ChatGPT, and

2. Strongly block ads, e.g. using uBlock Origin + EFF Privacy Badger. Yes, those don't work on Chrome, Edge and other Chromium-based browsers.

Also, even then - ChatGPT may be tracking your behavior indirectly through Microsoft's various services and platforms. But we should do our best to undermine mass surveillance and support individual privacy.

Privacy Badger works in Chrome, etc. (Manifest V3)

Yes, you're right. But uBlock Origin doesn't.

they both work on Helium, which is Chromium-based!

I noticed that the link for OAI’s ad pixel documentation itself has a tracking referral header to the author’s site (?ref=buchodi.com). Given the nature of the article, my instinct was that this is actually some next-level humour that totally sniped me. But now I’m not so sure- does OAI even have a kickback program? What would referral attribution even do here?

I'm guessing it's more likely their blogging platform automatically appends a referral header to links.

Oh, yep. Right you are. Just looked at their platform (Ghost) who uses a gently termed “outgoing link tags” system.

This has been around since at least April: https://www.adexchanger.com/daily-news-roundup/the-openai-pi...

If you liked how Facebook turned out, keep giving OpenAI your time, attention, and data.

https://tinfoil.sh/ - ultimately there is no guarantee that the LLM provider isn’t spying on you, but at least tinfoil claims to be unable to do so.

That is a nice sequence diagram[1]; I like how each endpoint param values are written out and the color distinctions. What tool did you use to create it?

[1] https://storage.ghost.io/c/b8/53/b853e3d4-3186-409d-9c7f-7da...

I don't know the tool used here, but DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash with bash can create a somewhat similar SVG: https://asdf10.com/diagram.svg

Disclaimer: I cut it off after a few minutes because I got impatient. It could have gotten closer if I waited longer.

why is OpenAI wasting their efforts on implementing ads if they are apparently close to AGI?

I would assume the skill set for implementing ads is quite different than the skill set for developing new models, so it’s quite reasonable to expect different teams are working on each

AGI will most likely have told them that this is the cheapest way to become rich.

Highly recommend you use Brave Browser and avoid all this nastiness. If you haven't browsed the web in a browser like Chrome recently, you should try it in a VM or something. It's GRIM. The Web is a wasteland and it's gotten worse because ai chatsites are eating their lunch to the ads are even worse than 10 years ago.

https://brave.com/

> The mechanism is standard adtech. What has no precedent is running it on an AI chat product.

Doesn’t Gemini or whatever Meta’s agent is do this too?

My favorite part about AI is that it will eventually lead to the destruction of social media when every post and every comment is AI or cant be proven to not be AI generated. People will eventually get tired of watching content and receiving AI brainwash news. I call it AI Fatigue. Social Media is very quickly becoming Social AI Media...

I thought 3rd party cookies were blocked on like every major browser, since like forever ago. Is Chrome still allowing this?

I've got Pi-hole and uBlock, use Firefox container tabs to isolate certain sites, and Firefox still reports it blocked over 2800 trackers this month alone. I wonder how many are still getting through.

Chrome still allows it. Safari and Firefox don't.

It's made by an advertising company. Of course it does.

I'm not really a code person, but would I add these filters to UBlock?

||bzr.openai.com^$third-party ||bzrcdn.openai.com^$third-party

> In observed traffic, scraped identity outnumbered advertiser-supplied identity 685 events to 255.

This sentence is even more concerning to me. Scraping user input should never be a way of collecting personal data from a website since it can circumvent any website controls without the website’s out the user’s knowledge.

Time to start having separate container for every domain. I'm pretty sure this should be possible in Firefox.

Firefox (effectively) already does that by default.

https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/introducing-total-cooki...

Doesn't really matter, they can track you in several ways.

Because at least one mechanism of tracking still exists we should just give up on blocking any of them?

This is bad. Like really SUPER bad. Firstly, for professional work you want your AI clean of useless context. Secondly, you also want your AI "unbiased". I know unbiased is not a thing, but at least not as grotesquely biased as towards selling you something would be. Thirdly, as many others are saying, the chamber of reflection effect deepens...

Does blocking `bzr.openai.com` on the DNS server prevent this? (without breaking ChatGPT)

Exactly what I was wondering. Guessing maybe there's more URLs to list or maybe can do a wildcard block of *.bzr.openai.com and then whitelist more specific stuff if necessary

Edit: looks like it's already blocked by Hagezi Multi Pro (and maybe lower levels) and OISD :-D

I noticed my YouTube recommended searches seeming to change based on what Claude has just recommended me the other day. I do wonder how much of this data is being shared between the companies.

Take this with a grain of salt or as a very edgy, polemic take:

I think we really need to hold the individuals running ad networks personally liable for the violation of our privacy rights.

Incredibly creepy. I'm amazed they don't have any idea quite how user-hostile this is, or the reception it would receive.

The ideal personal assistant should know what you do on other websites, and your personal files etc. But it should be local.

Even if I had an actual human person assistant, there would be parts of my life I would want to keep private.

Absolutely not. An ideal personal assistant should know about you exactly what you want them to know about you, and usually that's in a business context only.

I noticed that. I'm getting ads now based on conversations. I'm okay with it. I don't mind relevant ads.

I'm really feeling how important security is in the age of AI. We need to be careful cookie accept.

imagine stealing tons of content from every source on earth and then running ads on it

if a single person did that they'd be sent to prison (rip Aaron) but when a too-big-to-fail industry does it with political campaign contributions, no problem?

well firefox+ublock is still an option for those wise enough not to let unknown javascript with new daily zero-days run on their PC

This is basically what Google did when they pioneered the model of surveillance capitalism (see, e.g., The Age of Surveillance Capitalism).

Google simply provided an index on top of an existing library. Of course, a librarian has no value if he has no books to index over! But it's also worth noting that the Google "librarian" also leveraged the existing "social" structure of the internet: their core contribution (page rank) was a clever, efficient mechanism to extract the latent value in the pre-existing link structure of the internet. This structure (much like the pages themselves) had been curated by actual humans. Undoubtedly page rank was clever, but it was worthless without the existing websites (books) and the existing indexing information (the pre-existing, crowdsourced librarian work). Nonetheless, they successfully monetized it.

AI companies are even worse in the sense that initially Google was still sending traffic to the original webpages. (Until they didn't - https://www.eater.com/2017/9/12/16294380/yelp-google-scrapin...). So yes, the AI companies have even more thoroughly stolen the collective work of humanity than Google did.

remember the cache: search of google

so they basically have copies already of every webpage until they turned it off a few years ago (well they may still have it updated but not provide it as a service)

so it occurs to me they most definitely trained their "AI" on all that user cache

they may have even just turned it off as a service when they realized other "AI" could do the same thing

It is hilarious that this got downvoted, even when it's entirely factually accurate. I encourage the downvoters to respond to the content.

> imagine stealing tons of content from every source on earth and then running ads on it

This has effectively been Google’s business for decades. Not in the same form, but the concept is the same.

I spent 10 seconds skimming this blog post until realizing it's just AI generated (ironic) slop describing how third party cookie tracking works. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Third-party_cookies#Mechanism

Everyone would be far better off if the author just posted "OpenAI uses third party cookies [wikipedia link]", except maybe the author who wouldn't as many subscriptions for his "threat intel" newsletter.

> until realizing it's just AI generated

I didn't look at the prose closely enough to check for that, but people wrote inflated explanations of basic things like this all the time pre-LLM. The Wikipedia article doesn't know the specific cookie name, and can't show the results of an experiment verifying that it is in fact being used for ad tracking, or identify specific sites using it in collaboration with OpenAI.

>but people wrote inflated explanations of basic things like this all the time pre-LLM.

And those got a pass because at least you could defend them with some excuse about how it's some budding author trying to hone their writing skills, or trying to improve their understanding by putting pen to paper. Cases where those excuses don't work (think crappy content marketing pieces from random companies) got short shrift as well. Now for all you know, it's just some dude who prompted claude to "write a blog post about openai's ads".

There are specific details about how the mechanism works like the cookie name (__obi) that can help defenders.

I'm not aware of any filter lists that blocks based on cookie name. It's almost always done at the URL level. Moreover it's bog standard 3rd party cookie tracking. At least for the purposes of "help defenders", there's nothing in the blog post that couldn't be found in 10s with browser devtools.

> there's nothing in the blog post that couldn't be found in 10s with browser devtools.

The audience of people who can read and understand an explanation like this one is probably quite a bit larger than the ones who can replicate the experiment themselves.

And larger still than the ones who would bother to replicate the experiment themselves.

Yeah, I could tell few sentences in that it's Claude-written article. The style has become that distinctive. Hell, a third of the articles I opened on the HN front page today carried that distinctive style.

Doesn't really matter if the content is worth it (and I just realized that recognizing Claude in this also makes me wary of ways this could paper over key details - at this point I start to recognize from my own experience where Claude may be papering over something it didn't actually bother to check).

That just goes back to my original point, which is that this is AI slop and everyone would be better off if OP referenced a canonical description of what's happening, rather than wasting everyone's time by generating 1200 words of AI slop for them to wade through, all for some "threat intelligence" newsletter.

Why don't people hate this as much and riot with torches like they do against flock?

AI is really becoming a god that sees/knows everything. Just what we needed ...

Suspiciously sounds like they need an escape out of the profitability lie.

/tinfoil-hat

I quit ChatGPT maybe 9 months ago. Through with that.

Well, I don't go to website anymore... so ha! ;)

This might help:

``` ||openai.com^$cookie=__obi ```

Does this look right? AdGuard style.

Every AI company is also a surveillance company. It's the only way to get all the necessary training data. The fact that they're now also an advertising agency is incidental.

>It's the only way to get all the necessary training data.

That... does not follow. The information you're getting with this is what sites a user visits. That's creepy and valuable for advertising purposes, but is hardly the type of that that's going to bring about ASI, which is what all the AI labs are working towards. That's why they're hiring data annotators (sometimes with masters or phds) to get training data.

Ok, good to know.

Is this how random sites know what I search for?

Yes, third party cookies have been around for a long time to share info about you between sites. Make sure you turn them off in whatever browser you are using.

The defence is simply to delete your cookies?

Use "cookie autodelete" plugin!

crazy dude. chatgpt can't even see the full page content when searching the web and you're saying this...

Was considering buying ads on ChatGPT. A damning thing is that yours audience then are users too cheap to buy a sub...

That's a problem with most unsolicited online advertising. Are YouTube ad-watchers any more likely to splurge on your SaaS?

It's slightly different though, considering a lot of ad spend is for B2B products/services, and a lot of work pay for ChatGPT, so its only people who's work won't pay for a pro subscription.

Whereas, YouTube is for personal consumption in almost all cases, doesn't say anything about your employers willingness to invest in software/services

Just like mobile apps, subs will never come close to the growth expectation. Given trillions are tied up in AI, subs aren't going to do it.

Adtech based companies are evil

The entire ad tech industry may truly be an intelligence agency front. The lengths they go to track individuals is quite alarming.

Much of this information plus a shit ton of other information (ie, LEOs have access to credit reporting) can be bought by governments from the shady data broker networks already.

If people still ignorantly claim this isn’t a George Orwellian dystopia …

> The entire ad tech industry may truly be an intelligence agency front. The lengths they go to track individuals is quite alarming.

Never attribute to malice what can be explained as greed.

The quiet part you rarely hear is that advertising is a smoke and mirror industry akin to throwing darts at a wall. The idea of "homing darts" that stick the target a percentage more of the time would be very attractive in this analogy.

Tech turns advertising from mostly a buckshot spread into something that kinda sounds like something solid and real ("Look, numbers! CTR! CPC! KPI! Our ad product WORKS! Paying customers for your business, guaranteed!")

Ad budgets almost never correlate with actual performance.[0] We're all just lying to ourselves that this business model is performing as expected, and I don't think a reckoning is that far off.

0. https://www.forbes.com/sites/augustinefou/2021/01/02/when-bi...

> Never attribute to malice what can be explained as greed.

Why attribute to greed when the effects are indistinguishable from malice?

Because malice takes more intent and energy than passive greed. Malice is a human invention, selfishness is not.

wdym? its dangerous and effciant at the same time.

Honestly, the big labs are just making the case for open source stronger every day.

...only if and when you allow:

  - 3d party cookies
  - ads and other 'malcontent'

...which you should never do. As to the 3d party cookies there might be some rare exception where those can be useful but ads? Never, ever allow those on any device you use. Block them as if they're the radioactive plague because they are. Fight them on the beaches, fight them on the landing grounds, fight them in the fields and in the streets, fight them in the hills, never surrender.

That's ads we're fighting. Maybe the same oration will be relevant in the context of ChatGPT and its brethern, we'll see. For now, ads be gone and keep those chatbots at a leash.

So, knee-jerk-down-voter, what is it about what I said here which irked you so much that you just had to press that irksome button again? Or is it just because I happen to have said something else sometime earlier which makes you obligated by doctrine to down-vote whatever else I write? Let us know. Do you work in ad-tech? Don't you like the (ab)use of the Churchill quote? Is it the suggestion that it might be needed in relation to ChatGPT et. al. sometime in the future? Enlighten us, don't just attempt to get a dissenting opinion greyed out. That is for cowards, don't hide behind that button, don't be a craving coward, don't be a sheep. This is, after all, a discussion board, not some online likes competition where you get brownie points for getting rid of dissenters.

...or maybe it is the latter for some, maybe it is a way for some to raise their status among their co-religionists?

Comrade Knee-Jerk, what did you do for the cause today? Answer me!

Somewhere among the crowd a figure emerges, clearly nervous. He tries to speak but starts stammering, stops and tries again. What is he afraid of?

- Oh Great Leader, today I did the work to banish one of the hated dissenters from the internets by voting down his malign words so that no others may be subjected to anything but the Desired Narrative.

Is that all you did, Comrade Knee-Jerk? Is that how you claim your worth for the Great Cause? I am dissapointed, Comrade Knee-Jerk.

- Oh Great Leader, I will do better, I will educate myself, I will do my part to eradicate dissent from the internets for the Great Cause, I p...p....promise!

I do not like to be disappointed again, Comrade Knee-Jerk! I will have to think over your position, whether you are truly committed to the Great Cause. Now hide yourself. Comrade Zlither, what did you do for the cause today? Answer me!

Love how there's an extremely lengthy explanation of the oldest way to track people on the internet like this shit hasn't been happening since cookies were created.

who knew this was coming...

SpyGPT.

Creepy as fuck. I'm really suprised they don't understand quite how user-hostile this is.

> I'm really suprised they don't understand quite how user-hostile this is.

I'm really surprised anyone thinks these companies care.

"Now let me read your mind... Ah, it seems you like Castlevania!"

Another url to block in Pihole

What's the domain list ? Skimmed the article but still looking

Just remember it is the same ex-Meta employees who are now at OpenAI adding Ad features into ChatGPT.

Why? Because they are saving humanity. /s

Facebook tracks you outside of their own website for the same reason, and now ChatGPT does the same for the sake of...Ads.

I told you so. [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48996936

We. Are. FUCKED.

THIS is where the regulation needs to start.

Regulations won't be set (serious ones, at least) unless there's some risk to those holding power. Which is the opposite in this case: this tracking helps them to take even more control over society and individuals.

But politics is when people who feel differently try to do something about it

Any regulation will be geared toward protecting the profits of the AI companies, and not toward consumer protection.

Maybe it's time you all voted for people who might change that? It's really amazing to me how on the one hand people in the US seem to crow about democracy all the time, yet also just accept as a fact that their government will never actually work to help them.

I threw money behind getting Bernie nominated over Biden--none of this shit is my fault.

  Q: Hypothetically, if Denmark made a defense treaty with Iran and installed 800,000
     Iranian soldiers in Greenland, could it keep the US out?

  A: You are describing a fascinating scenario! [produces 100 lines of slop while giving
     the login to the FBI]. Should I find a website where you can buy the finest used
     AK-47s?

You are absolutely insane giving any of your thoughts, trolls, speculations to a surveillance website under your login.

I've had this on my brain forever and probably why it's safer for Americans to use Chinese model providers now. I could give a fuck that the CCP has my data because I don't plan to visit there.

They were always going to do surveillance. At least now you get a trendy e-commerce site recommendation too.

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the reflexive “ad tracking bad” that I am most savvy tech practitioners reach for might deserve some reconsideration in this case.

The thing about advertising on the web and ad tracking as a practice is that, barring the small matter of ensuring the economic survival of the publisher sites, it is almost always a negative for users. When we consider the marginal benefit of naïve, uninformed-by-surveillance advertising with the present day status quo, we find that in exchange for a complete lack of privacy, we only really receive a marginal improvement in ad quality. Of course, if you (like me) consider all advertising to be a negative on the experience of using the web, it’s an even worse deal.

The standard response given by these companies when they bother giving a response is something to the effect of “we are improving the experience for our users,” which obviously the users would disagree with. However, when it comes to OpenAI, they could build a plausible case for this sort of tracking improving the product. If your models know where your internet habits are, the responses that you get could be tuned for both your interest profile and your actual history of interactions/purchases/internet usage, etc. Imagine a world in which you can opt into this tracking, control the data you provide and how it’s used, clear it out and redact it as you please, and opt in and out of responses that are personalized against it. Reasonable people can disagree, but that might actually be useful.

My prediction, though: that’s not gonna happen. OpenAI will first build out the system to collect click and conversion tracking measurements, then they will turn around to advertisers and say “look at how good our conversion rates are,“ and then they’re going to build an explicit ad platform that enshittifies their chat products.

Yeah Google benefits you by tracking you and delivering more relevant ads too. Doesn't make it any less creepy.

Oh, the lifechanging technology isn't completely 100% free? They sell ads just like a bajillion other things?

ChatGPT is not 100% free in the first place, and this is about tracking and selling your data, not the existence of ads themselves.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com